Wind and rain chased us from the beach before lunchtime this afternoon. My dad and I had to escape the house or we were both going to go haywire in different directions, or head-to-head. We drove down to the Cape Cod National Seashore Visitor Center in Eastham.
We saw this exhibit the first summer we came to the Cape and it hadn’t changed a whole lot since then. They have the standard maritime exhibits in the one-room museum: an old boat (still smells like sailor), sand under a microscope (one of the lenses was broken off), stuffed birds under glass (gross aaand gross).
I could practically see the little me pacing through the aisles, impatiently forcing myself to read every word of every plaque to stretch out my attention span as long as possible, but not retaining much besides the dim lighting and enormous, low-resolution photo murals on the walls.
Being a kid at a museum is so hard, and not just because you have to crane your neck just to see or read anything. If someone had told me ten or twelve years ago that, one day, I would relish a leisurely walk through a museum, I would have rolled my eyes, but it’s true. Historical and art exhibits are both so much more engaging to the older, more patient, more thoughtful, more experienced, more fully formed me.
Even in a dry, sort of dilapidated exhibit, I found a lot to look at and I notice my personal interests away from the seashore reflected clearly by the displays that attracted me at the Seashore Museum.
There’s a section devoted to the U.S. Life Saving Service (the U.S. Coast Guard of today) which won the heart of my hero complex. Crewmen patrolled the beach all night, every night, watching for wrecks offshore. If the water was too rough to launch a rescue boat, the Life Savers would shoot a zipline from a miniature cannon out to the sinking vessel. Stranded passengers would secure the line to their boat and ride to shore one at a time in a breeches buoy. The line was shot over with a wooden tag with instructions written in three languages—a little like bottles of shampoo and mass transit advisories.
They have a display of vintage Cape Cod Cranberries labels. I also pressed my nose against the Cape Cod architecture exhibit, which showed the floor plans of a Cape-style home as the residents expanded it. I just wanted to play house inside the scale model.
Well, what I wanted to do was go to the beach. But this was nice, too.
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